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Dynamic recompilation

In computer science, dynamic recompilation is a feature of some emulators and virtual machines, where a program is constantly evaluated at runtime, and may be compiled again during execution.

This strategy is used because normal compilation must account for all theoretical cases and as such is somewhat inefficient. At run-time, a dynamic compiler has more information about the task required and what data to process, and can therefore produce more efficient and less redundant code.

Java is a popular programming language featuring dynamic compilation (at least in the more advanced VMss).

The HP Dynamo project is an example of a transparent dynamic optimizer.

The emulator used in Mac OS to run 680x0 code on the PowerPC harware was a dynamically recompiling emulator.